Citations Aren't Facts, Can't Be Untimely, Petitioners Argue

Several antidumping duty petitioners said in a March 7 complaint they will be contesting the Commerce Department’s refusal to combine a mandatory respondent with an affiliate for a 2021-2022 administrative review of an AD order on carbon and steel alloy from Italy. The department had said applications submitted by the petitioners included untimely information by citing prior agency memos not raised earlier in the proceeding (ArcelorMittal Tubular Products v. U.S., CIT # 24-00039).

The petitioners, led by U.S. manufacturer ArcelorMittal Tubular Products, argued that memo citations aren't “factual information” that can be untimely under department regulations.

They also said that, in its final results of the administrative review, Commerce made no attempt to “justify the rejection of Petitioners’ case brief and comments,” only noting that an earlier petitioners’ brief had contained “untimely new factual information” and that the petitioners, allowed to refile without the new factual information, had done that.

The department also erred in choosing not to collapse the affiliates, the petitioners said. Commerce abstained because it said two of the three legislative criteria for such a collapse weren't met. However, it “misconstrued the regulation” in two ways, petitioners said.

First, they said, it focused too much on the fact that mandatory respondent Silcotub couldn't produce subject merchandise when its production facilities were based in Romania, so that “even if the Department were to treat [affiliate] Dalmine and Silcotub as a single entity, any subject merchandise produced in Romania would not be subject to the proceeding.” Instead, it should have inquired into whether Silcotub simply had facilities that could produce similar products without “substantial retooling,” they said.

Second, the department wrongly found there was no major potential for manipulation of price or production due to affiliation between the two respondents even though it found “two out of three” factors for reaching that determination were met, the petitioners said.

They said Commerce “acknowledged that Dalmine and Silcotub are wholly owned by the same company and that they have significant transactions between them,” but, despite that, found no room for price or production manipulation between them for three reasons. First, the department said that “Silcotub does not export Italian cold-drawn mechanical tubing produced by any other company than Dalmine.” Second, it said Dalmine has reported all of Silcotub’s downstream sales of Dalmine’s products in its U.S. sales database. And third, Silcotub doesn't have a cash deposit rate of its own, it said, which would create "the potential for the companies to export under the more advantageous of the two rates.”

Still, because two of the three overall criteria for collapsing the entities were met, Commerce should have done so, the petitioners said. By calling it unnecessary, “the Department applied the wrong regulatory standard,” they said. They said they demonstrated as such in the citations that had been rejected by the department.